KOL SANA WENTA TAYEB They hung Saddam!” Those were the words many Egyptians woke up to on the first day of Eid Al-Adha last month. Inside scores of households, time stood still as entire families sat glued to their TV screens watching Al-Jazeera release one image after another, suspensefully building up former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s final moments.

Others, though, just hopped online to see the whole thing. Mere hours after Hussein dropped through the trapdoor of his gallows, mobile-phone footage of the execution made its rounds on Egyptian and Arab weblogs, or blogs, as they’re better known.

It’s a trend that began long before Hussein, though: Who hasn’t, in the past year, been emailed a link to any number of homegrown humor sites and blogs making fun of national politics, social foibles or simply atrocious local renditions of English grammar? More recently, who hasn’t watched a local contractor drop a steamroller onto a parked car via YouTube, the video-sharing site recently purchased by search engine Google?

More ominously, how many haven’t stuck around on YouTube long enough to view the sexual assaults of young women Downtown during Eid El-Fitr (a story broken in the “blogosphere,” as it is known) or to see a young woman hanging upside down from a bar balanced on two chairs, apparently in a police station, likely in Egypt, screaming her confession to murder: “Ana elli ataltoh!” (I killed him).

That’s right, folks: “User-generated content” — though most media types will admit that the name is kludgy — is exploding across the Middle East as bloggers gather primary information in the form of quotes, rumors, stories, photos and videos that are all too rarely seen in traditional media. It may be difficult to fact-check and it usually lacks the context, analysis and precise information provided by corporate news outlets, but it is unquestionable that private blogs are breaking news in the Arab world.

The bloggers’ aim: To get ‘it’ off their chests, and in airing their grievances, they have kick-started a new means of disseminating news — some have gone as far as calling it journalism — that is lapped up by young, computer-literate Egyptians starved for information.

In the case of the murder-confession video, it was a snap to track the video back to its source: Wael Abbas, the 32-year-old creator of the blog El-Wai’ El-Masri — or Misrdigital — who posted his name, email and a link to his blog with the video on YouTube.

Abbas is only one in a growing community of several thousand Egyptian bloggers.

According to Abbas, in a good month, over 1 million people visit his site. After he posted the video of the young, unnamed woman’s murder confession, 260,000 visited Misrdigital on a single day this past January, he claims. No wonder, then that Abbas was chosen by the BBC World Service’s The Breakfast Show (available to over 156 million listeners all over the world) to deliver a special new-year’s message. Abbas and Lebanese President Emile Lahhoud were the only two Arabs chosen by the show.

“At first, I was just one blogger among many. I was able to make mistakes. But to be chosen among the world’s most influential figures is scary. It is a responsibility,” Abbas says.

The video of Emad El-Kebir, which shows a man being sodomized with a broomstick as he screams “Maalesh ya basha!” is one example of how efficient and effective Egyptian blogs like Abbas’ have become in thrusting thorny issues into the spotlight. The case made national headlines throughout last month, but the story broke in the world of blogs.

“Demagh Mak [another popular blogger] called me and told me he had taken the video from a friend of his and didn’t know what to do with it. I told him to go to YouTube and post it and explained to him how to do it. Afterward, I posted it on my blog. Later, I found out that many others had posted the video as well,” Abbas says.

The news was soon picked up by local newspapers, which served the images up to a horrified nation. The weekly newspaper El-Fagr launched a search for the victim, who turned out to be a 21-year-old microbus driver named Emad El-Kebir. The officer allegedly responsible for the assault is now in detention awaiting trial. El-Kebir, meanwhile, is in jail, serving three months for resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. Another officer (of the infamous ‘slaps’ video) is currently facing investigation following the release of videos that allegedly depict police cadets being instructed in how to slap a suspect.

Abbas is not the only blogger who has posted controversial video content. So have sites like Demagh Mak, Arabawy and Torture in Egypt, to name only a few. “I am not the source for all the videos, and I am not the only one who showed them. The first two I published were the Imbaba videos: one of a man carrying a stack of books on his head, and the other of a man wearing a cap and being slapped on his afa (nape),” he remembers.

But who shoots these videos? Sometimes whistle-blowers or passers-by, but more often they are taken by sadists looking to record their triumphs.

As for how the videos leaked? Like many things in the blogosphere, there are theories, but still no hard evidence.

“Those who shoot the videos are probably the ones who release them,” Abbas suggests, “Also don’t forget that cell phones need repair sometimes, and [everyone knows] that people in the repair shops download everything they find on the phones they’re working on. Another source is cell-phone theft. El-Fagr newspaper published a piece about the theft of 20 phones at a police wedding. The officers had left the phones in the hotel safe, and went in to enjoy their colleague’s wedding, only to find them missing on their way out.”

Abbas’ interest in the internet started in 1994. Today a freelance journalist, photographer, ‘fixer’ and occasional correspondent, back in 1994 Abbas was a student of English literature at Ain Shams University. “I have been on the internet for a long time,” he says, “At first, it was through chatting and emails. I would write some of my thoughts and send them to my friends. Some of it was personal, some of it political or religious. I found out that the material I wrote engendered discussions. I started making mailing groups later, and then began writing opinion pieces”.

After graduation, Abbas took a string of jobs in IT and graphic design. Slowly, he dipped into journalism, writing first in English, but later in Arabic. Today, Abbas writes in colloquial Egyptian Arabic on his blog — his way of insisting his blog is mainly for Egyptians, he says, not necessarily for foreign consumption, as his detractors in official circles have suggested.

Before his interest in blogs, op-eds by Abbas appeared on sites including Shabab Masr, Arab Times, Al-Azmena Al-Arabiyya, Al-Nahar and Diwan Al-Arab, among others. “Blogging came later. I had been interested in electronic journalism for a long time. With a group of colleagues, we wanted to start an electronic journalism unit at the Press Syndicate. We hoped to get electronic journalists recognized. Unfortunately, this was sabotaged by people inside the syndicate,” he alleges. “We are still trying today, but it is difficult, [as] electronic journalism is free and limitless. Anyone can say anything online.”

Before starting Misrdigital in 2004, Abbas was part of another blog called Sout El-Shaab (Voice of the People) along with three friends.

“Politically, things started to get heated. The streets were rich with movements, and I had more pictures, videos, and articles than the blog could handle. I had to have my own personal space. Blogs offered me this space. The technology is so easy to use, as easy as signing up for a new email. That is when I started my blog, which is an electronic newspaper and a personal blog presenting news, opinions, ideas, so on,” he explains.

By 2005, there were at least 285 Egyptian blogs, according to Alaa Abdel Fattah of Manal and Alaa’s Bit Bucket, which today puts the figure at more than 3,000. Among the best known are Big Pharaoh, Sandmonkey, Baheyya, and Malek-X.

To Abbas’ mind, many of these blogs reveal a keener sense of journalism, and land more scoops, than the established print media.

Bloggers are often very upfront about their political leanings. Take Sandmonkey, who writes: “Be forewarned: The writer of this blog is an extremely cynical, snarky, pro-US, secular, libertarian, disgruntled sandmonkey. If this is your cup of tea, please enjoy your stay here. If not, please sod off.”

Abbas prefers to view himself as an independent.

“I do not belong to any party or ideology. I am a regular Egyptian who wants my country to be better. I want to see transfer of power, democracy, freedom, and freedom of opinion and expression. There are some Marxist ideas that I think are good, there are some Islamic ideas that I think are good, and there are some liberal ideas that I think are good,” he says. An avowed fan of pre-Revolutionary concepts of Egyptian nationalism, Abbas says, “I am pro anyone suffering from injustice. Ayman Nour is different from the Muslim Brothers, who are different from Talaat Sadat, who is different from the Kifaya detainees, who are different from Karim [an Egyptian blogger who is on trial facing charges of insulting Islam, insulting the president and inciting sedition through his online writings]. They are all different, but have all fallen prey to injustice,” Abbas alleges.

Still, Abbas says his mission is not to replace other media: “My mission is not a journalistic one. It definitely is not. My mission is to reach people, mobilize them. It is to acquaint people with their rights. I want the uneducated Egyptian to know that it is not acceptable for anyone to slap him on his afa. If I can do that, then that’s good enough,” he says.

Although he admits that not everyone in Egypt has access to the internet —an estimated 5.2 million Egyptians were online last year —word of mouth helps once something has been posted. “I do not think that there is anyone in Egypt who has not heard of Emad El-Kebir. This is success, sort of,” says Abbas, who believes that blogs have become a necessity. “All other media is either governmental, subject to censorship or tied to advertising and personal gain. This is true all over the world.”

But blogs are different, Abbas maintains.

“Blogs are published by independent people. They have ideas from here and there. They understand their country better than anyone, and have no ulterior motives. They are not funded by anyone, and are not trying to push the ideologies of anybody else. This is why they have more credibility,” he says.

Although Egypt’s blogs cover everything from personal thoughts and jokes to art and culture, it is the political blogs that attract the most attention and traffic. Similarly, Arabic blogs have become more popular locally than those in English.

“At the beginning, there were more blogs in English. These were started by people with a foreign parent, or those who have lived abroad for some years. They blogged in English to escape the constraints of society,” notes Abbas.

“For me, I do not blog to chat with my friends. I blog to reach everybody. I do not write for the benefit of the West. The fact that people in other countries show an interest in my work is because torture, for example, is a global human concern. It is just one issue among many, but it is certainly the most visible one in the media at the moment. I think that because the videos are out, something must be done about them. This is one card that can be played to bring about positive change.”

The role of blogs in bringing about change is a new development, and an unexpected one, Abbas believes.

“The system had gotten it all wrong in the beginning. They thought blogs had little or no effect, so when international press agencies and newspapers started coming to us for information, it started to scare them. I believe they will try to find a way, a legal way, to put a muzzle on user-generated internet content. I do not know how they are going to do this, and I wish they would not try to do it,” Abbas hopes.

And if user-generated content is shut down? After all, bloggers have not been in great standing with the state of late, with several having been arrested on defamation charges or questioned by investigators.

“I will still find a way to operate,” Abbas declares. “No one will be able to find me. I worked like this before, and I can work like this again.”

Links to hundreds of Egyptian blogs can be found at www.omraneya.net et